Saturday 19 September 2009 19.05 EDT
First published on Saturday 19 September 2009 19.05 EDT

Andy AtkinsFriends of the Earth

Our addiction to GDP is rather like being hooked on a class A drug – the short-term hit may feel good for a while, but it's dangerous, damaging and extremely hard to give up. GDP is helping to wreck the planet because it gives a distorted and highly misleading picture of the effect that economic activities have on our lives. Astonishingly, activities that damage or destroy our environment can count as growth. Huge fossil fuel investment over the next five years would for example create significant short-term growth in GDP and give the impression that our lives are better. But this crude measure takes no account of the impact that pumping carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere has on our climate. Failure to prevent catastrophic climate change will bring famine, drought and eco-system collapse – not exactly a recipe for long-term economic success.

GDP must be abandoned and replaced with a new indicator that reflects true success – our ability to improve the quality of our lives without destroying the environmental life-support systems we depend upon to survive.

Digby JonesLife peer

So President Sarkozy feels that we should all judge national performance using wider and more "social progress"-attuned criteria does he? As Mandy Rice-Davies once famously said: "Well he would, wouldn't he!" Without wealth creation no country can deliver more and better benefits for its people.

The longer holidays and the more efficient health service that the French enjoy comes from a social agreement to give up more of the individually earned cake for the possible benefit of the many. What the country cannot escape from is the need to bake the cake in the first place. We all as individuals can make value judgments about what countries do with the wealth they generate, how they divide it up, at what level of esteem they place the emphasis on environmental issues for instance, or training, or public transport, or cultural development. But without wealth creation, without the economic success of business, no matter how much it may annoy trade unionists, environmentalists, many in the public sector and obviously the French president, no one would have the luxury of making those choices in the first place!

Rt Rev James JonesBishop of Liverpool

In the pantheon of gods, even more powerful than Zeus is Growth. At his altar presidents and prime ministers offer sacrifices. Growth demands obedience and belief. But President Sarkozy, the Richard Dawkins of Growth, has sown doubts. He's asking questions about whether economic growth is the true goal of humanity.

Things that grow are not always benign. Acquisition does not guarantee happiness. We can learn from our childhood experience of longing for a special gift at Christmas. It comes. Oh joy! Then when the novelty's gone, we're left waiting for something new to make us happy. It's like satisfying your thirst with salt water.

It's true and right that the poor want more money to be happier, but all the evidence shows that beyond a certain level of prosperity wealth does not bring greater well-being. We need a dose of economic atheism! We need releasing from the cult of believers dogmatically enslaved to Growth. Thank God for Sarkozy's conversion! Why? Because the Earth cannot sustain such lavish madness. It is not a limitless larder.

Neal LawsonChairman of Compass and author of All Consuming

Politicians have the platform to send an electric current through the body politic. Sarkozy did it this week. The irony and frustration is that it takes a rightwing politician to say what leftwing politicians should be saying. GDP just measures output; whether that is good output ,like medical equipment, or bad, like cigarettes, and treats them just the same. It is the calculus of a growth fetish that says more is always best. Time, love, compassion, co-operation, happiness and sustainability find no echo in this dry utilitarian measure of success. GDP accepts the logic of global competition that every nation, and every person within them must fight for a greater share of a never-ending stream of consumer durables. And in that fight there will be winners and losers. The upshot is that the planet burns and the poor get poorer; even the successful live lives tainted by insecurity, anxiety and exhaustion. Sarkozy has turned the debate on its head. We should start to measure the quality of our lives, not the quantity of the rubbish we consume.